article · Resources Environment and Sustainability
This research assesses spatial patterns of forest fragmentation within the Kaffa Biosphere Reserve in Ethiopia across 33 years, providing projections up to 2049. Utilising multi-temporal Landsat satellite imagery and spatial landscape metrics, the assessment reveals a severe reduction in forest cover from 46.9 percent in 1986 to 30.5 percent in 2019. Concurrently, large core forest zones contracted drastically from 43.7 percent to just 6.1 percent of the reserve. The total count of forest patches initially more than doubled as continuous canopy broke apart, but predictive modelling indicates fragments will fall to around 2,000 by 2049 as smaller patches are completely converted to alternative land uses. Driven by road development and agricultural and built-up expansion, these landscape alterations underline severe habitat degradation and point to a need for revised natural resource management strategies.
Tropical biosphere reserves harbour exceptional biodiversity and provide vital ecosystem services, yet continuous canopies are increasingly broken into vulnerable fragments. Tracking long-term spatial change shows that the loss of core forest can be far more severe than total area loss suggests. These findings provide baseline evidence for regional authorities to reconsider existing conservation plans and target interventions before smaller remnant habitats disappear entirely.
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Forest fragmentation is a landscape-level process that comprises forest loss and changes in spatial patterns. Effective forest conservation programs thus require a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between forest cover and the spatial patterns of forest fragments. However, these matters remain less known for ecosystems in tropical regions. Hence, the study examines forest fragmentation of the Kaffa Biosphere Reserve in Ethiopia, which is a forested ecosystem of 744.9 thousand hectares. The study covers 33 years from 1986 to 2019 and forecasts for 2034 and 2049 using Landsat imagery. The land-use and land cover change maps were produced using a supervised classification following the maximum likelihood approach. The study quantified the spatial and temporal trends in forest loss and fragmentation using a multi-temporal satellite and FRAGSTAT raster dataset. The results display the forest areas declined from 46.9 to 30.5% from 1986 to 2019. The fragmentation caused an increase in the number of forest fragments from 4,067 to 8,832 from 1986 to 2019 but is expected to decline to nearly 2,000 in 2049 due to the complete conversion of small size forest fragments into other land use types. In addition, the size of the large core forest areas reduced from 43.7% in 1986 to 6.1% in 2019. The edge density of the forest declined from 30.5 to 27.1 m/ha from 1986 to 2019 and declined to 13 m/ha in 2049. The results confirmed natural and anthropogenic processes (e.g. agricultural and built-up area expansions and road network development) caused forest fragmentation and degradation in the Kaffa Biosphere Reserve. Therefore, the policy-makers should look at new options and revised the existed natural resource conservation strategies to safeguard the remaining natural forest covers.
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DOI: 10.1016/j.resenv.2022.100058
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